Word: beethovens
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THAYER'S LIFE OF BEETHOVEN edited by Elliot Forbes. 1 volumes, 1,136 pages. Princeton...
...Richard Wagner who called Beethoven "a world walking among men." The world was, of course, his music, and there is no more striking example of a world so self-contained or so apparently independent of the man who created it. All of the conscious or subconscious control that Beethoven was capable of seems to have gone into the music-leaving none for the day-by-day business of living. The human Beethoven could not add, could not learn the rules of grammar, and could not master his emotions. For a time, his biographers were able to ignore these facts...
...Ounce of Accuracy. Thayer was no debunker, but he was a scrupulous researcher after the truth. Until he wrote his Life, Beethoven biography had been a tissue of romantic fables and errors in "almost ludicrous contrast," as Thayer put it, to the facts of the composer's life. Thayer decided to set the record straight while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and the effort occupied him for the rest of his life. On the theory that "an ounce of historical accuracy is worth a pound of rhetorical nourish," he went abroad in 1849 and roamed...
Bonn's villagers, old, new, academic and foreign, can hardly wait for that happy day. Meanwhile, the new $34 million building program should at least make life more enjoyable for a crackpot who tried to burn down Beethoven's birthplace (now a museum) a few years ago. Asked why he had done it, the arsonist demanded with impeccable logic: "In this whole town, what else is there worth burning...
...Orchestras obey this law so piously that Beethoven and Brahms are rarely played outside of the basketball season...